The Travelling Hornplayer Read online

  Yours again

  Lydia Dent

  As Lydia has mentioned in her letter, I was no longer with her when she met The Novelist. I had missed him by one hour, having left in order to accompany our paternal grandmother on a trip to Derbyshire which she had offered me as an eighteenth birthday treat. When I returned, Lydia reported, rather casually, that he was tall and dark, and wore a white linen shirt and steel-rimmed glasses and deck shoes, which she estimated as approximately European size 46. She said nothing about him singing.

  The Novelist’s mother had been at school with Liddie’s godmother before and during the War. Both women were very musical. Both had married and were now widowed, though – while her friend had had six children – Liddie’s godmother had remained childless. Liddie was completely right in her letter about Godmother’s enthusiasm for The Novelist. She was a regular guest at all his launch parties and she liked to attend his readings. She was always in possession of his most recent hardback, signed and dated by the author.

  I do remember that the making of the carrot cake had provoked in Lydia and me all our usual gigglings and foolings. Lydia’s godmother had set us to grate the carrots while she had busied herself with the kitchen scales.

  ‘Godmother,’ Liddie said, ‘will The Novelist like his carrots grated finer than this?’ We wrestled enjoyably for turns with the grater.

  ‘Godmother,’ Liddie said, ‘will The Novelist mind bits of blood and grated bones in his carrot cake?’

  ‘Give over, Liddie,’ I said, as the grater fell to the floor. ‘Now look what you’ve gone and made me do.’

  ‘Godmother?’ Liddie said. ‘Will The Novelist mind floor scrapings in his carrot cake?’

  Lydia’s godmother had merely continued to regret that I was going to miss The Novelist’s visit and had expressed the hope that my grandmother would be just a teeny bit late. In the event, Grandmother was punctual to the minute, and I believe that The Novelist and his mother were late. I have been told that he was somewhere in the background at Lydia’s funeral.

  Just as she flattered us with assumptions of consensus in the matter of The Novelist’s work, so Lydia’s godmother had always behaved as if we were in agreement generally upon matters of high culture. She took us to recitals and theatres and poetry readings and to exhibitions of paintings. On the whole, she affected not to notice that we tittered and fidgeted our way through all of them. If a soprano had the merest hint of moustache, or a poet a tendency to gather saliva at the corners of his mouth, or a painter appeared to us over-keen on lilac-tinted depictions of female crotch and nipple, then these would be things to set us off on our gigglers’ course. If, on the other hand, the tenor were young enough or handsome enough, then Lydia would adopt a policy of staring at him fixedly with huge goose-eyes, until the poor man would resort to singing all of ‘On Wenlock Edge’ or ‘Have You Seen But a White Lily Grow?’ with his eyes glued to the ceiling.

  Once, when Lydia’s godmother had taken us to a production of Waiting for Godot, we had begun quite early on to wonder how long it would be before Godot came.

  ‘When does Godot come?’ Lydia whispered to me. I shrugged, having no idea, of course. ‘Godmother,’ she said. ‘When does Godot come?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lydia’s godmother. ‘Oh, my darlings, he doesn’t come, you see. Or perhaps he has come already. That is really the point.’ After that, Lydia fell asleep.

  From the start, GCSE German had made us giggle, along with more or less everything else. We giggled while testing each other’s vocabulary – and it is obvious that, for any English schoolchild bent upon rudimentary satire, a language in which the word for one’s male parent coincides so rewardingly with the word in one’s own language for a person given to anal expulsions of gas has blatant possibilities. We had already been disposed to it through the history class, which had offered us Martin Luther and his done-to-death Diet of Worms. Lydia informed us one weekend that a certain girl in her history class had been labouring under the misapprehension that Martin Luther had nailed, not his ‘theses’, but his ‘faeces’ to the church door in Wittenburg. Yet, to us, even theses had seemed bizarre enough.

  ‘Theses,’ Lydia said, ‘are what graduate students write. They come in huge books, about four hundred pages long. Martin Luther wrote ninety-five of them. And then he nailed them all to the door of the church in Wittenburg. The door must have been “pitted with holes the size of a sixpence”.’

  ‘Pitted with holes the size of a sixpence’ was one of our automatic giggle-phrases. ‘It must have given the vicar “fair gyp”,’ I said, which was another.

  One of our father’s elderly one-time colleagues, now dead, had suffered a leg injury during the war. His left thigh had been peppered with bullet-holes that had never ceased, periodically, to suppurate – a gruesome detail that his wife, an old-style staff nurse, had liked to dwell upon in detail.

  ‘Will’s leg is giving him gyp,’ she’d say, ‘fair gyp. Pitted with holes, it is, the size of a sixpence, and each one filled with pus.’

  All Lydia or I had to say when the couple came to visit was, ‘How’s Mr Kethley’s leg, Mrs Kethley?’ and the response was always delightful. Even the idea of a sixpence was agreeably archaic to the two of us.

  ‘Did you know,’ Lydia said to her once, after one of her more extended septic set pieces, ‘Nietzsche oozed a pint of pus every day?’

  ‘Every day?’ Mrs Kethley said crossly, as if resentful of such up-staging of Will’s capacity for festering.

  ‘Syphilis,’ Lydia said. ‘Our Sex Ed teacher told us.’

  Whenever we stayed with Lydia’s godmother, she would place one or other of The Novelist’s books on our shared bedside table, though these were definitely not the sort of novels that Lydia and I ever read. And to confirm us in our reluctance was the fact that The Novelist had won a prize. Throughout our childhoods Lydia and I distrusted any prize-winning book because we knew it would be worthy; and for worthy, we read boring.

  While our mother, before she left us all for her lover, had been inclined to abhor our philistinism in tones of despising innuendo, our father would cheerfully dish us out tenpences, chapter by chapter, as inducements to make us cast our eyes over the occasional improving volume. Or he would slip the odd superior book in amongst our Christmas and birthday presents, labelled in bold marker-pen, ‘This Book is NOT Literature.’ Though we dismissed most of his offerings as ‘boys’ books’, he did, in this way, expose us to some shorter works of decent fiction and, just once, to an anthology of verse, containing Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’.

  Occasionally, as we sniggered and shrieked our way through shared readings of dog-eared school stories, or through easy pulp romance, our father would oblige us by stopping to take an interest.

  ‘What on earth goes on in these frightful books you read?’ he’d say, and that was all the invitation we needed.

  ‘Oh, but they’re brilliant,’ Lydia would say. ‘This one’s completely brilliant. You see, all the teachers are lesbians. They’re all kinky and butch.’

  ‘All of them?’ Father said. Our father was, and still is, the headmaster of a public school. We had lived in some stone splendour in the headmaster’s house for most of our lives.

  ‘They all believe in sensible haircuts and sensible shoes,’ Lydia said, as though that clinched her assertions.

  ‘And punishment,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, lots of punishment,’ Lydia said. ‘Well, that’s except for the French teacher. She’s a weed, of course. And she’s always got her hair in “curl papers”. What are curl papers, Father dear? Are they like cigarette papers?’

  ‘Search me,’ Father said, who claimed never to have encountered a curl paper in his life.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lydia said, ‘she’s always got them. Not in class but at night, when she’s woken up by a mouse coming into her bedroom. The French teachers are always terrified of mice. I expect you’d call the rat-catcher if your school had mice, wouldn’t you?’


  ‘Dear me,’ was all Father said.

  ‘And the American girls,’ I pitched in. ‘They come to English schools so that they can learn to speak properly.’

  ‘And their fathers are called “Pops”, and they drive huge cars, and they’re all road hogs,’ Lydia said.

  ‘And they never ever get out of their cars at all,’ I said. ‘They’re surgically attached to them, we think.’

  ‘And if there’s a Spanish girl,’ Lydia said, ‘then she always swings upside down from trees, sort of like a primate, and her parents work in the circus.’

  ‘Big top,’ I said, ‘it’s brill. And the French girls are always cheats.’

  ‘They have to come to English schools to learn a Sense of Honour, but they never do, they can’t,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Why can’t they?’ our father said.

  ‘Because they’re French,’ Lydia said, ‘of course.’

  ‘And the teacher’s job is to make everyone into “ordinary little schoolgirls”,’ I said. ‘The teachers are all bombed on ordinariness.’

  ‘There’s this girl,’ Lydia said, ‘and she wants to be an opera singer, so she runs away to an audition because she’s not allowed to go. But then it pours with rain and she loses her voice and she gets very ill and then she can’t sing any more, and Matron says’ – here we both chanted gloatingly in unison –’ “Mavis can’t sing at all. She can only croak.” ’

  ‘After that,’ Lydia said, ‘Mavis becomes an “ordinary little schoolgirl”. She has pigtails and she croaks “Play up!” at the school hockey matches.’

  ‘Do you two learn these books off by heart?’ Father said.

  ‘No,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s just that they’re so good they stick in our minds.’

  ‘They’re fantastic,’ I said. ‘There’s this other girl, who wants to be an Olympic swimmer but she’s not allowed to train, you see, so she strikes out—’

  ‘In the rain?’ father ventured, half rising to go.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a storm and she’s dashed against the rocks and she’s paralysed.’

  ‘You see, it’s all right to swim for your school,’ Lydia said, ‘but the Olympics is a bit too ambitious – for an ordinary little schoolgirl.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Father said, ‘aren’t you two getting a bit too old for this sort of stuff?’

  ‘Never,’ Lydia said. ‘You can never be too old. Anyway, there’s lots of sex and bondage. We’re probably far too young for it.’ Father raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No, truly,’ I said. ‘There’s this bit when this girl who’s bombed on horses keeps sneaking out to see this horse that’s sick. But then there’s this horrible teacher that captures her and keeps on punishing her.’

  ‘She’s not horrible. She’s strict-but-fair,’ Lydia said.

  I ignored her. ‘She keeps on gating her and giving her lines and stuff,’ I said. ‘But she still goes on sneaking out.’

  ‘In the rain?’ Father said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lydia said, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘I really don’t think I can take any more of this,’ Father said. ‘So if you will excuse me—’

  ‘Anyway,’ Lydia said quickly, ‘she sneaks out in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, and suddenly while she’s there the teacher is right there behind her – because the teacher is really a Good Sort and she likes horses too.’

  ‘That’s the bond,’ I said.

  ‘Bond-age,’ Lydia said. ‘See, they stand all huddled together in the pouring rain and the teacher says—’ We did the next bit again in unison, dropping our voices an octave and putting on Marlene Dietrich voices – ‘“I zink I vill never haff to punish you again.” ’

  ‘So you see,’ Lydia said, ‘it’s all about SM and rubber macs. We need these books, Father. They’re sex manuals for us.’

  ‘And our mother’s not here to tell us anything,’ I said.

  ‘And you thought they were just school stories for “ordinary little schoolgirls”, didn’t you, Father?’ Lydia said.

  Our father laughed. ‘Spare me,’ he said. He made attempts to leave. ‘I really have things I must attend to,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I think you should punish us more,’ Lydia said, getting up and standing in his path. ‘Go on, punish us. Punish us now.’

  ‘My dear girls,’ he said. He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘My dear girls.’ And so we let him go.

  * * *

  I remember just a little bit later how hard we tried to embarrass him in front of the Stepmother, who was, at that time, not yet the Stepmother. She was Father’s new woman. It was during a Sunday lunch. Father had bought the lunch entirely in Marks & Spencer’s food department, because he was unable to do any sort of cooking except for what you did over camp-fires, and Liddie and I could only do jam tarts and cheese straws and convalescent diets and the sort of useless rubbish they’d taught us to make at school.

  Liddie and I had been reading a trash romance about the Regency period.

  ‘We’ve read this historical novel,’ Liddie said to the new woman. ‘It’s educational. It’s all about this French convent girl.’

  ‘She’s not French,’ I said, ‘she’s an English convent girl. Her fiancé’s French, that’s all.’

  ‘OK,’ Liddie said. ‘Sorry. She’s English, but she’s supposed to marry this Frenchman, you see. Arranged Marriage. He’s kind of experienced and wicked and all that. Well, he would be. He’s a French comte.’

  ‘But this girl,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t want to marry him because she’s in love with someone else, so her friend says she’ll marry the comte instead, in disguise.’

  ‘So she does,’ Lydia said, ‘and the comte doesn’t even notice.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he notice?’ said Father’s new woman, while Father helped her to a carefully calculated twenty-five per cent of the M & S salmon en croute that he’d somewhat high-roasted in the oven.

  ‘Oh, veils and stuff,’ Lydia said vaguely. ‘You know. Anyway, he doesn’t notice and then after the ceremony they go gallop-a-gallop all the way to Dover. And then they go on a boat. But he reads his book all the way and—’

  ‘What does he read?’ asked Father’s new woman.

  ‘Oh, well, never mind,’ Lydia said. ‘Some Black Lace number, I expect. But anyway, she’s too sea-sick to raise her head and he orders his manservant to see to all her needs.’

  ‘Not quite all her needs, I hope,’ the new woman said, a little saucily.

  ‘And then they go all through France,’ I said, ‘bumpety bumpety in a golden coach, until at last they get to his château.’ Father’s croute had become so papery-dry, it was hard not to puff it about the room as one spoke. It was like those amaretto papers that used to make floaty angels in the air when you set them alight.

  ‘And still he hasn’t noticed,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s so exciting.’

  ‘One of the maids meets them in the hall,’ I said. ‘And she does lots of curtseying and bowing and scraping. And then she takes the convent girl up vast flights of stairs, and bathes her, and brushes her hair with a hundred strokes, and anoints her with perfumed oils, and puts her in a silk nightie, and tucks her up in a four-poster bed hung all around with tapestries.’

  ‘And then,’ Lydia said, ‘after a few tankards of brandy, the wicked, experienced comte turns up and they do the business, and—’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Father said.

  ‘They do it,’ I said, ‘and all is Confessed and Revealed.’

  Father was attending to his new woman’s wine glass.

  ‘And next morning I suppose she’s got cystitis?’ ventured the new woman.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Lydia said confidently, though I don’t think either of us had heard of cystitis at that point in our lives. ‘He forgives her because he’s wild about her. Because she’s so snowy-white and inexperienced. You see, men always love virgins.’

  ‘Broccoli for you, my dear?’ Father said, offering his new woman the M
& S veg au gratin that he had decanted from the oval-shaped foil dish into one of our mother’s oval-shaped Alsatian ceramics, thus causing the gratin to present itself upside down.

  ‘You can tell she’s inexperienced because she always speaks in dots when she’s in bed,’ I said.

  ‘You mean she speaks in Morse code?’ Father said.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s sort of like this. Like she’ll say—’ and here Lydia clutched her bosom and talked in a higher, girlier voice than usual ‘– “Oh,” dot, dot, dot. “My dearest comte,” dot, dot. “My beloved husband,” dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. “Take me,” dot, “all the way up to heaven again,” dot, dot, dot.’

  ‘The comte is terrifically lechy and sexy,’ I said, perhaps extraneously.

  ‘Please can we have arranged marriages, Father, with sexy Frenchmen?’ Lydia said.

  ‘Oh yes, please,’ I said, ‘with wild, bad, experienced comtes. And then we can swap. Liddie can have my comte and I can have hers.’

  ‘That happens in a Mozart opera,’ Father’s new woman said – a remark which we instantly found more deeply embarrassing than she had found any of our prattlings. ‘The men come back in disguise,’ she said, ‘and the women don’t recognize them.’

  ‘Pudding,’ Father said firmly and he got up and was away for some minutes. He had bought four tea-cup-sized M & S Treacle Puddings and a half-litre carton of M & S English Custard. He had heated the puddings, two by two, in the microwave and had inverted them onto Grandmother’s Crown Derby pudding plates. The custard was still inexplicably in the carton, wrenched open at the side that said ‘Open Other Side’.

  ‘Bravo,’ said the new woman, who had grown up in America. ‘Oh, I just love these little boarding-school puddings.’

  It was not long afterwards that the new woman became the Stepmother.

  * * *

  Lydia and I were fond of the Stepmother and pleased to see our father become so happy. A lot of our knockabout clowning had been our clumsy, unwitting attempts to cheer him up, I think, because he’d been so shut in and grave in the two years since our mother had left. We had each other, we reasoned, while he had only himself, now that we were away at school.